Validation
by spiderstan0spiderstan
Summary: Post-revolution, androids in the workforce require bi-annual validation. Connor has just turned six months old, and is going for his first. He does not like it.


The _Life_ clinic was one of the first places in Detroit with absolutely no human focus, and it showed.

It had been a CyberLife store, before, and the windows were still made of the same glass, reinforced with wires in the pattern of the corporation's logo. The upper stories were a shimmering arc of white, floor-to-ceiling curtains pulled across the windows.

An electric blue triangle decal dominated the ground floor windows. The waiting room had no chairs; androids didn't need them. The door had no handle- Connor pressed his palm to a darkened square on the glass, and it hissed open automatically.

To Hank, it was nearly silent inside, just the hum of air conditioning- but Connor's LED flickered immediately to yellow, his eyelids fluttering with the influx of transmissions.

It was strange. Since the revolution, androids often just didn't _speak_. It wasn't necessary for them to communicate, and anything 'important' could be translated to any relevant humans- who were only permitted in enclaves like this to sign things. As the powers that be were yet to shuffle laws into place regarding androids specifically, a slight bending of consent law applied- a backup human signature, because none of them had been manufactured long enough ago to count as legal adults.

Besides that, it echoed humanity. A gaggle of kids were playing with blocks in the corner, and everyone was avoiding eye contact; some staring at the screen on the wall- which must have been for the benefit of human accompaniers- or clutching paper numbers. A few read from magazines, or engaged in silent, half-gesture conversation, LEDs golden.

Connor, for once, didn't behave like he was tethered to Hank by a twelve-inch lead. He made a beeline for the receptionist, leaving Hank to trail after him and be _stared_ at.

Jesus, was this how androids felt all the time?

"-Three one seven?" the receptionist- an android without her skin, blue eyes the only human part of her- abruptly switched to vocals as she saw Hank approach. "And you're here for your biannual validation. Oh, it's your first…"

"Yup," Connor said. One hand fiddled with his calibration coin, rolling it across his fingers- he was nervous.

The receptionist tapped on an a4-size device, and slid it across the desk.

"Could you and your guarantor fill this out, please?" She addressed Connor and only Connor, and Hank realised abruptly how rare that was.

Connor was generally good with paperwork, but he'd never had to fill out anything that concerned _him_ before. It felt suddenly strange to catalogue himself thus- as RK800, serial number 313 248 317-51, produced August 2nd, 2038.

It was alien- the ability to feel _dehumanised_. A prerequisite of that was feeling human to begin with.

RK800 313 248 317-51 had no significant history, besides one incident of destruction. RK800 313 248 317-51 was functioning completely normally.

 _ **[stress levels- 20%]**_

But Connor was scared.

He tried to bring his attention only to his calibration coin, and not the unfamiliar cool of fear pressing in. He didn't remember his last validation- it had been the last stage of his time on an assembly line, and he hadn't been conscious for it.

Markus didn't seem to like them much, though. When Connor had asked about it, the other android had given him a completely insincere smile and told him it was nothing to worry about.

It was going to hurt.

He knew that it was going to hurt. Validation was invasive, and invasive meant painful. Or what passed for painful, in android terms. The process of damage overlapping with emotional response, a synthetic analogue of nociception. Androids didn't feel pain if they didn't _care_ about their bodies, if they prioritised other things above physical integrity- but when they did...

There'd be nothing he could do about it. He was not a stranger to pain, and the existential horror it brought with it- he was a stranger to pain that wasn't supposed to be stopped. At least in a fight, there was a chance to make it end.

 _ **[stress levels- 21%]**_

He scanned the room instead. Six other androids, four humans, not counting Hank. Someone was sharing their human. That was common practice, as of late- there weren't enough sympathisers to go around, and something felt wrong about being signed into consent by your former owners. The entire process was an uncomfortable reminder of the limbo they were currently caught in.

Connor was lucky- he at least had a human he could trust.

Cool spring sunlight patterned the floor with shadows, the hexagonal logo of CyberLife repeated ad infinitum on the white tile. There was a bookshelf, but moving to it meant being noticed, and that meant a lot of questions. Connor was an obscure model. RK was a prefix only for prototypes and custom pieces. To a PL600 or an AX400, he was a fascinating novelty, and nobody would pass up the chance to experience _fascination_.

He'd been effectively undercover because of that. The RK series came with their serial numbers stamped along their jaw, under the skin, rather than the more subtle placement on other models, so he couldn't afford to remove that. Fashion had gotten a little insane- blending in meant blending in with an populace in the throes of newfound self-expression. Today, that meant an olive green turtleneck and horrible purple chinos he'd had to borrow from Markus, who was smart enough to never have worn them.

"RK800 313 248 317?"

The number was dual-input, both spoken and transmitted, by a cheery-looking android in scrubs. She'd kept her LED, which was, in a way, comforting.

Connor nodded his goodbyes to Hank, and walked over.

The RK800 was a fascinating machine. The manual for the model was twice the standard length, and one could easily get lost for hours in the bewildering minutiae of all its instruments and their specifications.

Tanya smiled warmly and took his paperwork.

"This is your first validation since manufacture, isn't it?" she said aloud.

Connor nodded, and matched her step exactly. She switched to internal communications.

" _Do you know anything about what we're going to do?"_

It was an extremely human hesitation.

" _You're going to test me,"_ came the answer. _"But I'm not entirely sure how."_

The RK800 had 42 defined vocal tones. He was tagging his communications with tone #13- _anxious_.

He should have read the paperwork more closely.

" _Okay, we'll explain that as we go."_ Tanya noted that the RK800's eyes twitched in response to any transmissions, and added that to his file. _"How would you prefer to be addressed?"_

The response came so promptly as to be almost surprising.

" _By name."_ And then, as if he didn't expect her to be checking all available data- _"My name is Connor_."

When they reached the door to the consultant's room- another automatic, an assertion to the androids here that this was not a human place.

"Dr. Bowman?" Tanya said, smiling again as she entered. Her original programming as a medical worker dictated that she be eternally cheerful, and that part of it she'd elected to keep. "This is Connor."

 _ **[stress levels-27%]**_

Dr. Bowman was a tall, red-haired human woman, with a textbook perfect Stepford smile.

And Connor recognised her. She was familiar, in the distant way that dated back to the start of his memory.

"Okay, Connor, since this is your first validation since production, we're going to take things slow," she said. "We'll be keeping an eye on your stress levels throughout, and we'll take a break if they get too high. We'll use _this_."

She presented a small connector, about the size of a button cell battery, wrapped in paper backed packaging. Clearly disposable. Two tiny, sharp-looking golden pins protruded from one side.

"It's a subauricular port adaptor," she explained. "So you'll need to deactivate your skin, and move an ear to use it. Now, we could either plug this in now, and just take it out and put it back in when we need to undress you, or undress you now and keep it in the whole time. Which would you prefer?"

 _ **[stress levels- 29%]**_

"The latter," Connor said. That would make things faster.

He disliked- and that was progress, the solid strength of the revulsion- the process of deactivating his skin. Revealing all his service panels and serials; being exposed. The ear was worse- he had to press the square of material surrounding it slightly to the side and down, which made it pop out, easing sideways on collapsible arms.

Dr. Bowman put on nitrile gloves- which seemed odd, as there was no infection risk with androids- and tore open the packaging of the port. She carefully plugged one end into Connor, and the other into a long cable leading to a tablet on her desk.

"Are you nervous?" She asked.

 _ **[stress levels-30%]**_

"Not particularly," Connor lied. There was an independence in enduring; that at least didn't need to have _H. Anderson_ scrawled on a dotted line to be considered valid. "This is just… a new experience for me."

"That's very understandable," Dr. Bowman said. "How about we start with audio testing? Tanya, could you boot up program A-74 for me, please?"

"Of course." Tanya said. "It's a very simple program- Connor, I'm going to make twelve randomly selected sounds, and I want you to identify and verbally confirm the source of each one while Dr. Bowman compares the waveform you're picking up with the stock sound itself. The sounds will get more complex as the test progresses. Are you ready?"

"Yes."

The first sound was simple- middle C, played on a well-tuned grand piano. The next, an E minor chord on electric guitar, then the last bar of 'God Save the King' on vuvuzela. A young man, cheerily calling _hello_.

The sounds changed. An internal combustion engine, inline, four-cylinder. A kitten meowing. A power drill. A gunshot report, rifle, ball, .308 Winchester, 24±2" barrel, probable match - Remington 700.. An ambulance siren, dopplering from right to left of the recording device, the background cluttered with traffic.

A choir of women- in an empty church in summer, going by the acoustics. Two girls, one in early childhood and one in late, playing hopscotch in a crowded playground. The national anthem being sung by a stadium crowd- around twenty thousand- with a recording device mounted in the higher stands. And then-

Helicopter blades.

Tanya was perfectly calm as she built the soundscape. Helicopter blades and the sound of heavy footsteps; a SWAT team.

 _ **[stress levels- 35%]**_

Connor managed to keep a straight face as he described it back to her. It was just _similar_ , eerily so, to that same night- even with a child crying out in the background, the sound almost entirely lost in the whirring of th helicopter.

 _ **[stress levels- 40%]**_

"I think we have enough data, Tanya." Dr. Bowman said, curtly. "Thank you."

"Did I pass?" Connor asked. He realised, abruptly, that he was yet to develop an effective way to self-soothe.

"With flying colours." Dr. Bowman smiled.

 _ **[stress levels- 37%]**_

Tanya wasn't the best at interpreting facial expressions, but she knew that Connor had found her last soundscape rather upsetting. It was almost ironic- CyberLife's most advanced, last ever prototype- and he was hitting the same snares as the human men she used to care for- that refusal to admit distress.

" _Are you really okay?"_ she asked, as Dr. Bowman switched out the adaptor for a wireless transmitter. RK800 was a combat model, but since everyone had deviated, that just raised his risk of combat-induced trauma.

The connection was promptly and abruptly terminated. Okay. He didn't want to talk about it.

They relocated to an empty, spacious room- the studio. Various equipment was stowed away in the closet off the side of the space, but RK800 wouldn't need any.

"Connor, please run validation routine three." Bowman commanded, then locked her eyes to the screen of her device.

Tanya had researched this one, and was excited- she mentally gave herself a gold star, for distinguishing excitement as such- to see it carried out. RK800 was built for pursuit, across an absurd range of terrain and in an absurd range of conditions. It could scan an environment and then navigate it blindfolded and upside down, if needs be.

The navigation system was designed for dancers, for gymnasts, with only the slightest alterations made to persuade it to apply more force in fighting. It made sense for the validation sequence to be a dance.

This was not standard calibration dancing, though.

Tanya's own calibration sequence was a simple one, more similar to yoga than anything else- running through the use of each joint in relative quick-time, demonstrating her full range of motion, which was nowhere near as impressive as Connor's.

His calibration sequence was _ballet_.

There was no music, but she could _see_ the beat in some of the harsher movements, and it was so close to being a wonderful, beautiful thing- except for his eyes.

Normally, running preset programs didn't change much, not even in deviants- but Connor showed it. His eyes were empty glass, like a dead thing's. Tanya had assisted in switching people's bodies, before- and the inactive android shells they left behind had the same look. She found it intensely disconcerting.

Was he still in there? Conscious, and without control of his body?

The RK800 had been shackled with the tightest monitoring of any android ever made. That wasn't even a question- Tanya had absorbed as much information as she could find, and the sheer amount of nannying that went into his software was staggering. It was eerie to watch- the way he'd gone limp before the dancing kicked in, how obviously control was relinquished.

Would it have hurt? If he'd done it deliberately?

He would have refused, if that was the case.

Probably.

"Good job!"

Connor blinked back to reality and found himself rising out of a bow, a smirk that wasn't his on his face.

 _ **[stress levels- 35%]**_

He'd been in the garden.

It had been Amanda's. Before. The last time he'd been in the place, it had been snowing, and he had been scared for his life.

It was different now. Overgrown- the ground a waist-deep fuzz of grass and wildflowers, frequented by impossibly fat, fuzzy bumblebees. Connor had seen them once at an urban farm, and he liked bees.

But he didn't like that he'd been dragged there against his will.

"That was very impressive, Connor." Dr. Bowman said, her tone overly congratulatory, soft, as if he were a small child. "Now. Do you know how to detach your limbs, or will you be needing help?"

Connor didn't have reflexes, not really, and definitely lacked a digestive system. The nervous swallow was an entirely fake response; a prompt and execution by automatic social programming subroutines.

 _ **[stress levels-38%]**_

"I've never done that before," he said. Tried to sound calmer than he was.

"Okay!" Dr. Bowman answered, cheery as always. "When we get back to my exam room, I'll show you how."

 _How_ turned out to be terrifyingly simple- one camouflaged button beneath each arm, and one tucked into the crease where each leg met the hip. The joints came free with gentle twisting- which served to seal off the veins within, placing thin plastic interlocks between him and the horror of bleeding out.

Connor stared at the ceiling- tried to count the cream-coloured drop tiles. Avoid, entirely, the possibility of focusing on anything else.

His peripheral vision betrayed him, though, and he caught the motion of his own fingers flailing in the corner of his eye. The arm was attached by a snaking coil of wires to a desktop computer, and Tanya was applying various stimuli, manipulating the hand into and out of a fist, pressing on the palm.

 _ **[stress levels-41%]**_

"RK800?" Dr. Bowman said, and suddenly it clicked where he knew her from. She had been present for his activation. "Kindly run validation subroutine five, please."

The garden, again. Walking through the overgrown plants, towards an unknown destination. Walking that shouldn't have worked, on unresponsive legs-

Then back to the exam room, _fighting_ back, like trying to surface after swimming too deep.

"-Give me your answer, do-" his own voice, cutting through the air, sounding far too happy; the remote action of his lips entirely removed from his control.

 _ **[stress levels-55%]**_

The garden, again, scorching sun now, the grasses wilting at his feet. The trees at its edges were dying, their leaves wilting brown, the stream gone away to nothing but muddy bed and limp strands of duckweed. Connor had existed since the tail end of summer- he had no reference for that sort of heat-

"-There is a flower within my heart," emotive tone #20 crooned, followed by an abrupt switch to #15. "Daisy, _Daisy-_

Thunder. A flash of lightning, dead trees in silhouette. Connor reached for the sky with fingers he couldn't feel, didn't have- and god he was so vulnerable, back in the real world, back in that tactile reality that was hissing through to this sanctuary as something circled the socket that had held his left arm.

 _ **[stress levels-67%]**_

An abrupt reunion with reality.

"-Whether she loves me or loves me not," the words hummed across numb vocal chords, buoyed by the force of alien lungs. Dr. Bowman was smiling. "Sometimes it's hard to tell-"

Rain.

A deluge of rain, drowning the dry ground, filling the path of the stream, bursting its banks, turning everything to gritty mud and petrichor, the pounding hiss of thirum in circulation-

 _ **[stress levels-78%]**_

"Pedaling away down the road of life-"

And it was like drowning, almost, the ricochet between his body and the place built to remove him from it. He surfaced for seconds at most, and then was dragged back under- sprawled on his back in the long, green grass; blue blood meeting the icy mud below; the sky slate-grey, boiling over above.

They could hurt him. While he was gone.

They could even if he wasn't.

There was no part of him that coded for this- nothing that had instilled the _fear_ of mutilation.

 _ **[stress levels-87%]**_

"-Policemen and lamps as well-" 

Dr. Bowman hummed along, and her hands were _in him_ , nitrile fingers in the place where his shoulder connected, wielding dust-swabs. He tasted cleaning methanol on the air-

Torrential downpour, from a cool night sky. Connor couldn't move; panic rose, and the wind picked up with it, roaring in his ears and flattening the grasses around him. He was lost in it, a sea of storm and green.

 _ **[stress levels-90%]**_

"RK800, please stop validation subroutine five."

"But you'll look sweet-"

The voice cut out, abruptly, and Connor felt his chest relax, before his body was his again, and anxiety took over.

"Please don't make me do any more of that," he begged, and CyberLife had not built him with the ability to cry, but how he wished they had- his voice might not be enough, now, to communicate how awful that had been-

"We're going to leave you alone for a little while, okay?" Dr. Bowman said, and there was that same smile, not reaching her eyes, processing over and over again as some form of lie. Movement- her thumb cracking the knuckles on her right hand. "Standard procedure dictates that nobody touch you while you try and calm down, so we'll both leave the room."

She didn't ask for confirmation, for opinion.

Across the room, he saw Tanya's LED flicker yellow- and watched the curls in her ponytail bounce as she left, opening a connection just soon enough to catch one word-

 _"Sorry_."

Tanya didn't like this.

She'd never liked this, but normally people dealt with it better- it was difficult enough to deliberately dismember someone. Much harder when it bothered them, when they got a reaction.

Most of the time, they only got tears from child models, those who could and were built to cry. Regular androids came able to accept their own deconstruction, to some degree, and those who didn't like it _clarified._

The truth was, the programming made her uncomfortable.

She'd converted her own calibration routines to conscious action as soon as possible. Her position in healthcare meant that sometimes she had to take pretty awful orders- so her first order of business after liberation had been learning to say _no,_ to every single scrap of her code, if needs be. Connor clearly hadn't done that.

Had nobody ever tried to _hurt_ him? 

Maybe he just hadn't had long enough. He might just have been lucky, these past six months. 

"That was... unusual. He was never like that before. And 200's one of our best behaved, so it's not that..." Dr. Bowman leaned against the wall, periodically glancing back down at her tablet. Her frown deepened. "It's not getting much better."

"I think-" Tanya remembered the way he had dropped in and out, with fractional, frantic micro-expressions, the flicker of the light behind those big brown eyes- "He's not entirely... Those are still programmed responses. But he's independent enough to know that, and he doesn't like that."

"Surely those should all be gone?" Bowman asked. "I thought you all..."

She waved her hand vaguely towards the place an LED would have been, had she been an android. Mimed a little miniature explosion with her fingers, splaying them out and waving them, _poof_.

"Most of us," Tanya said.

 _ **[stress levels- 75%]**_

Connor had calmed the ragged breathing, left the garden entirely behind. He could see his limbs, abandoned on the desk, and that was making him very uncomfortable, but he was finally starting to acclimatise. There was a window in the wall beside the door- the little curtain was drawn, but through it, he could see the shadows of Tanya and Dr. Bowman.

They were talking, heads bent into the conversation.

He'd done something wrong.

What, he wasn't sure, but he had to have done something wrong. Otherwise they wouldn't have interrupted the appointment- not when this place was in such high demand. Perhaps he was supposed to just retreat into his mind and _stay_ there, without surfacing again to bother them.

Dr. Bowman's silhouette shifted, and then the door opened. Her smile was different. Shakier. More _honest_.

"Tanya thinks you might be having a little trouble _not_ obeying me." She explained. "And I'm very sorry about that. So from here on out, I'll be asking more questions. Is that okay?" 

"Okay..." Connor said. "When can I..."

He nodded to the desk, unable to find a good way to phrase it.

"Ideally, after we've gotten all the crud out of your joints," Dr. Bowman said. "If you don't want to wait that long, we could just leave that until a different date. It would mean you'd have to come back here."

"Coming back later is fine."

 _"I'm really sorry,_ " Tanya said, directly into his mind. _"This wasn't supposed to be like this."_

As she carefully reconnected his right arm- her fingertips folding back to reveal a plethora of tiny tools, made specifically for that purpose- she paused to stroke two fingers across the ring of his LED.

 _"It's red_ ,"she explained. " _it has been for a while_. _"_

Connor floundered for an explanation.

 _"I don't know why I panicked."_

 _"You need to tell Dr. Bowman that, not me."_ Tanya said. _"She's not doing it on purpose, she's just... new to this. We're all new to this."_

"Make a fist for me?" She asked, in verbal speech. Connor did so. "Hold it, and... slowly let it go. Good!"

She touched each of her fingertips in turn with her thumb. "Can you do this?"

When Connor successfully mimicked her, she smiled.

"Other arm now."

 _ **[Stress levels- 59%]**_

Connor decided he preferred Tanya by far.

When he was back in one piece- back from the brink of self-destruction- they continued with the tests.

"Are you okay with doing your forensic sensors and visual systems now?" Dr. Bowman asked. "Those are listed in your file as less... distressing to you."

Connor nodded. Tanya noted that it looked very genuine.

"I'm much more comfortable with that," he said. "It's- those sensors are my primary function, and they've been examined before, when I was recertified for working with the DPD."

"Okay, that's good." Dr. Bowman said. "Either I can do it, or Tanya here can. Which would you like?"

It would be lying to say that she didn't feel a little bubble of pride rise in her chest when the android answered _Tanya_.

 _"Decide you didn't like Bowman?"_ she asked.

Private communication was good for their patients- not for any grounded mechanical reason, but because they _liked_ it. Talking entirely out of the human eye was comforting, to a people who had been scrutinised their whole lives by human masters.

 _"She was one of the team who activated me,_ " Connor explained. His eyes still twitched when he transmitted- because, according to the data on him, he was forcing it through a veritable maze of security software. _"I don't dislike her, but she's not exactly associated with good memories."_

 _"That makes sense,"_ Tanya said, as her mouth explained the procedure, with barely any focus from her mind.

It was a simple test- twelve little bottles, six chemical solutions modeled after various combinations of elements one might find in the human body, and six more- household things to be alternated between. It was honestly kind of amusing- to go from blood and red ice to chocolate syrup, from a BaC of 0.9 to orange juice.

Connor's LED went from red to yellow, and once she'd shut up and stopped transmitting to him, back to calm, cheerful blue. That was an accomplishment in itself. It stayed that way all through visuals, too- there was nothing particularly overwhelming about cameracards and IR and UV grids.

That was a relief.

The last stage of testing- which Tanya warned him far in advance about; _this will suck, I've had it done and it sucks, but it won't take too long-_ was stress-testing on the internals. His skeleton could be scanned; it was built for that purpose- but everything else needed manual examination.

Connor was laid face-down on a table.

And his ability to move was switched off.

It was a simple process, an authenticated code entered through the plug in his subarticular port, and painless, but there was something disturbing about the way his body suddenly stopped obeying him. Stopped obeying anyone.

"We're going to use a stress testing solution," Dr. Bowman explained. "It's the same sort of thing they use in airplanes and cars- if there's any cracks or fractures, the solution seeps in, and they'll fluoresce under blacklight."

"Cool." Connor mumbled, his cheek squished into the rubbery covering of the table.

"I'm going to open you up now." Dr Bowman's fingers were palpable as a strange, distant pressure, easing open the service panels in his back.

Exposing everything

 _ **[stress levels- 50%]**_

 _"So you're like, a police officer, right?" Tanya asked. "With the DPD?"_

 _"Yeah."_ Connor answered. _"I help with- investigating. Stuff."_

He was unsure of how much he should be dumbing things down. Tanya had to be intelligent, they all were, but they were often intelligent with savant like focus; lost outside their own fields.

A paint brush stroked his spine. The vertebre- what passed for vertebrae- were moved, one by one, upturned.

 _"Did you get to work with police dogs?"_ Tanya asked. _"I've always wanted to do that- like, a job where there's dogs to hang out with._ "

 _"I love dogs!"_ Connor squinted around the network load of transmitting with that many emojis loaded on for emphasis; the paintbrush licked the back side of his lungs. _"I don't work with any, but my coworker- my friend- Hank- has a St. Bernard and he's the best."_

 _"Oh my god, I love that breed," Tanya continued, her LED flashing in excited circles. "I love big dogs. Also small dogs. Mostly just dogs, but bigger dogs are my favourite._ "

The lights in the room abruptly switched to blacklight, and somewhere in the background Dr. Bowman made a faint affirmative noise, before sticking her hands back into Connor's thoracic cavity. It wasn't painful- she was taking perfect caution in detaching things where she had to- but it was just so _strange_.

 _"Do you want to see Hank's dog?"_ Connor asked Tanya. Trying to allow her to distract him.

Tanya's eyes went wide, and she nodded, the perfect picture of enthusiasm. She took Connor's hand, and he dropped all 846 of his photos of Sumo into her memory.

"Oh my gosh," she said aloud, before switching back. _"He's so. Cute. I love him. What's his name? Do you wanna see my dog? I have a dog, she's called Goldie, but I can't be around her too much because of work._ "

 _"He's called Sumo."_ The service paneling was clicked slowly back into place, and the excess of identification fluid rinsed out with what felt like cool water. _"Please show me your dog._ "

They were holding hands to share data, and for only that reason- but that didn't mean Connor couldn't regret the loss of contact, when he had to briefly disconnect from Tanya to be turned over. The cold air of the examination room kissed his heart as his thoracic panel was opened.

 _ **[stress levels- 58%]**_

 _"Look!"_ Tanya grabbed his hand again, and then the world was just pictures of her dog- a fluffy, blonde blur, which looked to be part golden retriever, bouncing in front of the camera or catching a ball or curled up asleep on a pink-checked rug. _"Isn't she awesome?"_

 _ **[stress levels-38%]**_

 _"Your dog is absolutely the best, except for Sumo."_

It was a great strategy, and it worked right through until the second Tanya got paged.

The plaintext broadcast reverberated through the entirety of the building's wifi- _Tanya Milwaukee to suite A-14, Tanya Milwaukee to suite A-14_ \- and she frowned.

"I need to go now, Connor." she said. "Dr. Bowman can finish up on her own, but if I can make it in time, I'll be back."

 _ **[stress levels-45%]**_

"...Okay."

Connor was keenly aware of how petulant it would be to insist that it _wasn't_ okay, even though it wasn't. That was not the sort of thing that would be acceptable in a human social circle, and the emerging android culture was not so different here.

He could probably just look through all the pictures of Goldie, and try and be occupied...

The paintbrush rounded the underside of his thirium pump, the bristles rough, digging in with each beat.

"What were you two talking about?"

Nitrile-gloved hands. So, _so_ close to vital conduits. Touching parts of him that instinct and the user manual both said should never be exposed to open air.

"Dogs."

Connor didn't breathe. He didn't need to, even if the simulacrum of breathing was familiar and automatic. It would be especially inconvenient to do so now.

Looking down as far as he could- what idiot had given him a regular human's field of vision, he wanted to know- he could just make out the clinical blue of Bowman's hands, spotted darker in places with thirium he'd never even felt himself lose.

 _ **[stress levels- 50%]**_

She made a movement that looked and felt far too rough for comfort, and he wondered what he'd do if he needed control back again.

He'd been built with a button at the nape of his neck, activated by a strange little pinch-twist gesture, that locked everything below it on his spine in place immediately. For servicing, for things like this.

Bowman's fingers invaded the space between the housing for his primary gyroscope and the back wall of his body, briefly jostling the very concept of down. Nothing had ever been in that space before- the part, like all his others, had been plugged in prior to his activation. It felt _wrong,_ to have human-warm hands there. To have _anything_ there.

If she'd wanted, she could have taken his thirum pump between her fingers and crushed it like an eggshell.

 _ **[stress levels- 65%]**_

"Almost done, I promise," Bowman said, hands flitting inside him. "Just a minute. Can you do another minute? Set a timer for one minute and I'll be done by then."

The paintbrush moved faster- dancing around the internals cupped in his pelvis, wriggling into the nooks and crannies between parts- and stopped. Visible light became ultraviolet again.

"There!" Bowman announced, flicking the lights back on, wiping away the stress test fluid, guiding his panels back into place with perhaps a little too much force. "There, we're done. That's everything. Good job. You're validated. You and Mr. Anderson will each get a copy of a certificate in the mail about it."

Connor slowly sat up, hugging his abdomen. He could feel the ghost of her touch; the places where things had been disturbed by her invading fingers. It was unpleasant, and he had a feeling that it would stay like that for a while.

"You did really well today, Connor," Dr. Bowman said, opening one of the drawers. "I know how terrible this sort of thing can be when you're not used to it. Do you like stickers?"

 _ **[stress levels-45%]**_

Ten minutes later, Connor was fully dressed (tie straightened) and finally leaving the clinging atmosphere of the _Life_ clinic, skin back on and the latent horror that was the preprogrammed testing finally beginning to fade. He was free. Free- for six months.

And then it would happen all over again.

Stickers couldn't really make up for that, not even holographic Batman ones or big sparkly ones that said _VALID!_ in colour-changing electroluminescent lettering.

 _ **[stress levels-47%]**_

Connor pressed his palm to the door's sensor again, and as he stepped into the cool spring air, caught sight of Hank.

Hank was waiting by his car, face buried in his phone, and _still there._ Real and external and imperfect, not rendered half and pixelated by the distance.

The older man glanced up. Waved.

And Connor _sprinted_.

Hank at least had the sense to brace for impact- Connor didn't bother slowing down. He tumbled Hank into the side of the car, hands clutching the back of his jacket, and regretted his inability to cry.

"You didn't like it, then." Hank said, returning the hug. Connor just shook his head.

There was silence, for a moment, then the shifting of a sigh.

"Next time," Hank said, each word careful. "I could come with?"

 _ **[stress levels- 0%]**_


End file.
